Xiaomi sold more phones in the first half of 2014 than entire last year

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi today announced that it had shipped 26.1 million smartphones in the first half of 2014. This is a staggering 271 percent rise from last year, and also four times the 7.03 million devices shipped in the first half of 2013.

To put this number in better context, Xiaomi has now shipped more smartphones in the first six months of 2014 than the total number of devices it sold in 2013. Xiaomi sold 18.7 million smartphones last gear, which too was a 160 percent rise from the year before.

The Chinese company also revealed that revenues for the first half of 2014 had touched 33 billion Yuan ($5.3 billion). This is a 149 percent rise from last year, when its revenues had hit 13.3 billion in the same time period.

Xiaomi now plans to ship 100 million devices by the end of next year, and it plans on doing so by expanding into other markets like Brazil, Russia and India. The company has been rapidly setting up a base in India, and BGR India exclusively reported, it is planning on launching its first phone later this month in partnership with Flipkart. Last month, it launched its Indian website and also hired Jabong co-founder Manu Kumar Jain as the head of its India operations.

Xiaomi will first launch the entry-level Redmi 1S in India later this month, followed by the flagship Mi 3 sometime in August. The former is an entry-level smartphone featuring a 4.7-inch 720p IPS display, a MediaTek 6589 quad-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz, 1GB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage along with a microSD card slot. It comes with an 8-megapixel rear and 1.3-megapixel front-facing cameras. The Redmi 1S runs on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean with Xiaomi’s MIUI V5 on top.

The flagship Mi 3, on the other hand, features a 5-inch 1080p IPS display, a 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory. It comes with 13-megapixel rear camera with dual-flash and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, both capable of shooting 1080p videos. The Mi3 also features dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC and Wi-Fi Direct. It has a massive 3,050mAh battery as well.